Intel Arc is the newly announced brand name for Intel’s upcoming high-end graphics chips. Arc is fine and all, as it competes with Nvidia’s Geforce line and AMD Radeon’s GPUs for a lucrative slice of the discrete GPU market.

What’s more fun than Arc are the code names Intel will use for its generations of Arc GPUs: Previously known as DG2, the first generation Intel Arc chips are officially codenamed Alchemist. 

• Future Arc chips will be known by the code names Battlemage, Celestial, and Druid, which is fun.
• And that’s also a hint from Intel that it is committed to the market.

Intel’s GPUs may actually be solid:

• First, Intel’s not starting at zero or a complete first-generation approach — it’s had integrated GPUs for an eternity, and its 11th-gen cores have been able to play decent high-level games without a discrete GPU.
• There’s also software expertise, with Intel releasing drivers for games with performance boosts, just as AMD and Nvidia have done for some time.
• Intel’s Xe-HPG microarchitecture will be used to power Intel’s high-end performance graphics chips for gamers and cryptominers.
• They’ll also support features like “hardware-based ray tracing and artificial intelligence-driven super sampling,” to compete with Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX upscaling. The chips will also fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 12, all the fancy features included.
• You may have seen a DG2 name floating around for this in the past: That was a tentative name given it was a follow-up in some ways from something Intel released only to system builders, called the DG1.
• The Alchemist launch will be a series of graphics cards, likely split between desktop performance and low-power draw mobility options, RAM configurations, and cores. In short, no spec sheets are available yet.
• Intel also released a trailer showing some current PC games running on pre-production Intel Arc Alchemist GPUs.

The problem:

• Gamers and PC builders need those GPUs now. It’s still hard to find even far less-mighty cards on the market, let alone anything like an Nvidia RTX 3090 or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT.
• And if you want to game on PS5 or Xbox Series X, you’ll struggle to find one of those too.
• With reports Intel is relying on TSMC’s 7nm process, it seems like it is constrained on supply, and Intel said it’ll be a “first quarter of 2022” release.
• I doubt Q1 2022 will see an end to the cycle of shortages, but having more from Intel now might’ve helped…